Royals surge shows no trouble for Angels

The Angels might lament that they didn't last longer in the American League playoffs, but it's hard to argue that anyone in the AL was going to beat the Kansas City Royals, who are headed to the World Series. The Angels are headed to 2015 with a strong club with a good chance of making that trip.

The Angels need a big bounce back from Josh Hamilton if their five-year, $125 million contract with him is to be vidicated (Keith Allison/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license).

By BILL PETERSON

Big Leagues in Los Angeles

An old saw in sports says that offense fluctuates and defense is a constant. The saw doesn't exactly explain what happened to the Angels in their American League Division Series (ALDS) loss to the Kansas City Royals. But it's a pretty good description.

The Angels finished the regular season with the best record in the game, 98-64, and they did it with hitting. And they lost the ALDS in three games because hitting fluctuates. 

That's really all there is to it. The Angels didn't hit for three days, and they lost three games. They batted only .170 in the series and scored only six runs, despite hitting four homers. It can happen to anyone, and it happens all the time. Playoffs magnify that, but they do not make it remarkable. It's probably, indeed, more likely to happen to a good team in the playoffs than the regular season because, in the playoffs, you're not playing the Houston Astros or the Minnesota Twins. No one gets to the baseball playoffs without being good enough to win them, and that's even after expanding the playoffs to five clubs in each league.

Thus, we find no deeper meaning in the Angels' rapid playoff demise. Explanations? It's three games. The season is a marathon containing many moments, good and bad. If the good moments outnumber the bad, you win in the end. The playoffs are only a moment, and, if the moment isn't right, you lose, right now, and it's over. The End.

The flip side to all of that is the Royals, who were sky high when they played the Angels and have remained that way ever since. After sweeping the Angels in a three-game ALDS, they swept the Baltimore Orioles in a four-game American League Championship Series (ALCS). The Royals will begin the World Series tonight at home against the San Francisco Giants.

The Angels are just going to have to process all of this. It can't be easy, but it's not as if they rolled over against a club they should have beaten. As well as the Royals are playing, it's ridiculous to say anyone should beat them.

During the six-month grind, the Angels were the best team in the game, only to be dispatched in three games by a club that couldn't even win a division. Responses along the lines of "So what?" are in play here. What's not in play is any notion that there's some flaw in the club's design that make it unsuitable for going deep into the playoffs. Perhaps, should the Angels flop in the playoffs the next couple of years, we might detect patterns, but, right now, it's just three games in the dumpster.

The Angels remain an outstanding club, and they took a huge step forward in 2014. They added two very good starting pitchers to their mix, Garrett Richards and Matt Shoemaker, entirely from within their organization. Missing Richards for the postseason certainly didn't help. At the very least, a healthy Richards would have enabled the Angels to delay C.J. Wilson's dreadful Game 3 start until Game 4. Might have harshed the Royals' high a little bit, changed the energy and given the Angels a chance to come back in the series. But maybe not.

Angels general manager Jerry Dipoto should get a nod or two for rebuilding the bullpen on the fly during the regular season. That was some fine work. Bringing in Huston Street to replace Ernesto Frieri for holding ninth-inning leads gave the whole operation a new breath of competence and confidence. With offseason free agent Joe Smith around to carry the eighth, the sixth and seventh innings become opportunities for mixing and matching the limited abilities of certain relievers against the limited demands of those circumstances.

Cole Kalhoun became the regular right fielder this year, and he probably is the guy we saw. Mike Trout finally will win his MVP award. Erick Aybar and Howie Kendrick once again were the players we've been seeing for a few years. The top catcher, Chris Iannetta, is a good baseball player. 

It quickly became irksome to hear the television commentators during the playoffs talk about the greatness of Albert Pujols in the postseason when anyone with just a lick of sense knows he isn't even approximately the same guy who used to win all those big games for the St. Louis Cardinals. Pujols once was the greatest player in the game. Now, he might be one of the best five first basemen in the American League. Still a very good player. But he won't build his Hall of Fame case on his years with the Angels. That doesn't mean he won't help the Angels win, or that the Angels need to upgrade at first base. He will make the day a little better, but he will not save the day. Those days are long gone.

Going forward, the Angels have the pieces together to win the division again in 2015, but there are a couple of red flags. Josh Hamilton and C.J. Wilson each will be in his age 34 season with lots of contract left and decline almost certainly in the future. The Angels received good value in the first couple years of Wilson's deal, but he fell off badly in 2014 and now has two years and $38 million of contract remaining. The Hamilton signing can only be characterized as a grievous mistake. He has delivered almost nothing in two seasons with the Angels and he enters 2015 with three years and $89 million of contract left.

Those are two old players eating a lot of salary and diminishing the club's flexibility by that much. Word from Anaheim has it that the Angels will work their club around the edges. They certainly want to come in with a payroll beneath the taxation threshold of $189 million and, according to the estimates on baseball-reference.com, they figure to come in around $160 million if the pick up all their contract options and go through arbitration with all who are eligible. So, they have a little room.

The club is set in the outfield with Calhoun in right, Trout in center and (lamentably) Hamilton in left. They've got Pujols at first, Kendrick at second base and shortstop Aybar all under contract for 2015. They've also got catcher Iannetta under contract and his backup, Hank Conger, is due for arbitration.

The only pending free agents of much interest are utility infielder John McDonald and reliever Joe Thatcher, both of whom would be well worth signing and neither of whom figure to be expensive. McDonald earned $850,000 in 2014 and he's well worth a million. Thatcher is a hard-throwing left-hander who would really give the Angels a lift if he's healthy. Questions about Thatcher's health and effectiveness, as well as the direction of the market, might take signing him out of the question for the Angels, but they do need a left-handed specialist out of their bullpen.

The Angels still have the pieces, and the question now is whether the pieces will fit again. A productive fitting of the piece would include left-hander Tyler Skaggs continuing his development and being around the whole year, and there's still the matter of how Richards will come back. But it's all there. It's still just a matter of fitting together.

Angels lose Richards, but not division

The Angels apparently will have to compete for the rest of this season without pitching ace Garrett Richards, who went down with a ghastly knee injury Wednesday night in Boston. But they are all but assured of going to the playoffs. And their team to beat in the American League West, the Oakland Athletics, aren't the team they were a month ago.

Angels manager Mike Scioscia will have some juggling to do with his pitching staff for the rest of this season (Keith Allison/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license).

By BILL PETERSON

Big Leagues in Los Angeles

Did the Angels lose the American League West Wednesday night?

Well, they won their game Wednesday night, 8-3, on the road against the Boston Red Sox, which increased their division lead over the Oakland Athletics to 1 1/2 games, their largest lead of the season.

They also lost their best pitcher.

The moment Angels right-hander Garrett Richards fell to the ground on his way to first base as he attempted to cover the back end of a double play in the second inning, this club's aspirations appeared to go dark. Richards laid out on the ground clutching his left knee. An object of skeleton that should have been inside his body appeared to protrude outside of his uniform. The club's training staff had to roll him over to get him onto a stretcher, then the stretcher had to be loaded onto a vehicle. 

The Angels already trailed, 2-0, in the bottom of the second inning at Fenway Park against the Red Sox, the last-place club in the American League East. Into the game came Cory Rasmus as the new pitcher. 

And the wheels began to spin. How in the world can the Angels make it through a season-ending injury to their ace pitcher, the hardest throwing right-handed of any starting pitcher in Major League Baseball?

But the Angels have not disappointed us this year, and there's so much to like about this club that it's hard to lose confidence. Even in the midst of that disaster, the Angels came back with a five-run fifth inning to take a 6-3 lead. Rasmus survived 2 1/3 innings without further damage, then Mike Morin tossed a shutout inning, then Fernando Salas, then Kevin Jepsen, then Joe Smith, then Huston Street. And the Angels kept their season moving. 

The Oakland Athletics lost earlier in the day in their own park, 8-4, to the New York Mets. The Athletics are reeling. From the day their general manager, Billy Beane, made the deal that brought him so much praise – the deal that tore the heart out of their everyday lineup in exchange for left-hander Jon Lester from the Red Sox – they are 8-11. 

With Yoenis Cespedes departed for Boston in the trade, the Oakland batting order slashed .224/.299/.344/.643 from Aug. 1-17. Before that trade, the A's slashed .253/.329/.405/.733. The American League this year is slashing .254/.318/.393/.711. With that deal, the A's went from being a much better than average offensive club to being a much worse that average offensive club.

It isn't that Cespedes was enjoying such an awesome season, but he wasn't bad, running a 115 OPS-plus with the A's. Since the deal, his OPS-plus with the Red Sox is only 80. But the man who came back to Oakland in the deal to replace Cespedes as the A's left fielder, Jonny Gomes, is OPS-plussing only 60 for the Athletics. 

Beane really disrupted his club's balance offensively. Before the deal, the Athletics ran out lineups with up to five guys who could hit, meaning four guys who couldn't. With Cespedes gone, they never have more than four players in their lineup who can hit, and sometimes they have even fewer. 

But the Angels now have fewer pitchers, and this is a club that seems to have fewer pitchers every day. They've already lost lefty starter Tyler Skaggs for the season, and they're still waiting for lefty reliever Joe Thatcher to come back from the disabled list. 

But no loss hurts like losing Garrett Richards, who entered Wednesday's game with a 13-4 record and a 2.53 ERA. And as Wednesday night ended, there was no indication of what they can expect from Richards. The club announced during the game that Richards suffered a left patellar injury. The patella is the kneecap.

"It's a significant injury," Angels manager Mike Scioscia repeatedly told reporters after the game.

The big question, of course: How significant? Can Richards be back in time for the postseason? 

No one knows.

But there's a lot else no one knows, which is why we can't answer the question with which we began, the question of whether or not the Angels lost the AL West simply because they lost their ace pitcher. 

The one source of help on which the Angels can not depend is a trade that would depend upon some pitcher clearing waivers. Because the Angels, at 75-50, have the best record in the Major Leagues, they are last in turn on the waiver wire. Any club that wants to stop the Angels from acquiring a pitcher can simply stake a claim on that pitcher. Reports tell us that Texas Rangers right-hander Yu Darvish and New York Mets left-hander Jon Niese have cleared waivers, but those would be hard deals to make.

In the minors, the Angels have little to trust. Their only pitcher at Triple-A Salt Lake who even conceivably belongs in a poor big league rotation is lefty Wade LeBlanc, who couldn't last more than one inning for the pitching-starved New York Yankees after they took him from the Angels on waivers in June. The Yankees released LeBlanc and the Angels signed him two days later. They might be glad now that they did.

At Double-A Arkansas, the Angels have 24-year-old lefty Michael Roth, who is 10-6 with a 2.82 ERA. Chances are, he gets the start the next time Richards' turn comes up.

Three more items to consider:

First, we don't know that Richards would have been the same pitcher down the stretch that he'd been approaching the stretch. He had never, in any professional season, thrown 160 innings. When he went down Wednesday night, Richards was on 169 1/3 innings. The Angels never had any guarantee of how well Richards would pitch in September with all those added innings on his arm, though they would much rather have found out. Either way, it was unknown how Richards would respond to the added innings, and we can't assume that the pitcher they've lost is the pitcher we've seen all season.

Second, the Angels almost certainly are in the playoffs, already. With 37 games left in their season, they are 7 1/2 games ahead of the AL's sixth-place team, the Seattle Mariners. If the Angels (75-50) go 18-19 the rest of the way, the Mariners (68-58) would have to go 26-10 and the fifth-place Detroit Tigers (68-56) would have to go 26-12 the rest of the way to knock the Orange County club out of the postseason. We have little hope, after watching Richards go down, that he will pitch any time before next spring, but the Angels do have that much cushion, just in case there is enough time to bring him back for the playoffs. 

Third, Athletics aren't 10-feet tall anymore. They were 59-36 at the All-Star break, a .621 winning percentage, which projects to 101 wins over a full season. Since the All-Star break, they are 15-16. For the remainder of the season, there is no scheduling advantage, to speak of, either way. The Angels and the A's have 10 games left against each other, starting this weekend with three in Oakland. The Angels have seven games left against Seattle, and the A's have six. Every other remaining opponent for the Angels and A's this season has a losing record, except for this: The Angels have one game against the Cleveland Indians (64-61) and three against the Miami Marlins (63-63).

Thus, the Angels didn't lose their division Wednesday night. They did lose their best pitcher. And they still have enough to win their division without him. Which doesn't mean they will.

Editor's note: All numbers in this piece are from Baseball-Reference.com.

Moreno: LA's unsung baseball hero in 2014

After taking the heat for over-reaching his baseball operation to saddle the Angels with a poor club in 2013, Angels owner Arte Moreno doesn't receive enough praise for reversing his own course and giving the baseball people room to operate in 2014. The Angels are back to being an elite club this season, and Moreno's new patience has a lot to do with it.

Angels owner Arte Moreno has left his baseball club to his baseball people in 2014, and the results are obvious (public domain image).

By BILL PETERSON

Big Leagues in Los Angeles

They don't give an annual award for the most reviled person in baseball across Los Angeles. If they did, they'd have to retire it, anyway. Frank McCourt would win it every year. Still.

If, however, active participation were a requirement, then it's hard to imagine a more likely winner in 2013 than Angels owner Arte Moreno.

As of one year ago right now, no rhetorical task across the game would have been much tougher than defending Moreno's leadership of the Angels' baseball operation. In short, he was an ignoramus and a busy-body, the proverbial  – and all-too-real – rich guy with a baseball club for his plaything. These guys never understand the game because they think baseball is like other sports, replete with game faces and outcomes dictated by brute force.

Moreover, Moreno is a marketing guy who saw his club as a marketing project because, you know, when you're a hammer, everything is a nail. Thus, Moreno reached past his baseball people for two consecutive offseasons, signing the likes of Albert Pujols, C.J. Wilson and Josh Hamilton to $500 million worth of free-agent contracts while the organization's player development operation languished as one of the least promising across professional baseball.

It wasn't really until last season that the entire mess came home to roost. Pujols produced his worst season ever before finally going on the disabled list with a plantar fasciitis in his left foot, the Angels made the characteristic error of thinking Hamilton could whisk into a new position (right field) just because he was on a deal worth an annual $25 million, the club decided to sign Joe Blanton  instead of giving those starts to Garrett Richards, and a disjointed club turned in a disjointed season.

The Angels finished 78-84, their worst season since 2001, when they finished 75-87 in Mike Scioscia's first year as the club's manager. The Angels that had been built by Bill Stoneman had run their course, and the new direction was not promising. Some fans believed Moreno should respond with something big, like firing Scioscia, or firing general manager Jerry Dipoto.

But Moreno did nothing of the sort. In his darkest moment as the Angels' owner, Moreno instead did something really big.

He pointed the finger at himself. In interview after interview across the national media (since he deals so seldom with the local media), Moreno made himself accountable, said he's the owner and it's on him. Moreno couldn't be led into selling out his high-priced players for under-producing. He refused to pin it on his manager, and he said outright that he wanted to give Dipoto's systems a chance.

So, when the 2013 season ended amid speculation that Moreno might actually eat the last five years of Scioscia's contract, there was, indeed, no news. And throughout the offseason, there was little news – just a couple of trades and a couple of changes on the coaching staff, the kind of events to characterize an ordinary offseason for any club. But there was no news, no headline news, no big initiative designed to scream across the media. 

It was, in fact, rather a dull offseason, an offseason of baseball people making baseball decisions. The owner kept his hands off.

Now, if we didn't want to give Moreno credit for seeing the light, that would be easy to do. Surely, it wasn't an attractive proposition for the Angels to go into the big free-agent market again, since the club opened the season with a $155 million payroll and has so much money committed to future seasons that another big contract would remove any remaining flexibility, particularly with the club angling for a long-term deal with Mike Trout. Additionally, anyone looking at the talent on this club had to know it really wasn't as bad as the 2013 season showed.

In fact, the Angels enter Wednesday's game against the Dodgers at Angel Stadium with a 67-45 record, the second best across Major League Baseball. And it has a lot to do with the fact that the owner didn't make a chaotic situation even more chaotic by going crazy on his top people. Instead of pressing the baseball operation with marketing initiatives, Moreno let the baseball operation operate a baseball club. 

Everyone around the Angels, it seemed, could take a deep breath, which is for the best because the Angels run like mad and they needed a breath. The Angels are back to playing baseball a lot like we remember from their best days under Scioscia. The focus is on players already with the club. The new guys giving new blood to the club are their own guys.

There's Richards, starting every fifth day instead of some mediocre free agent. There's Erick Aybar at his demonic best, and Howie Kendrick hitting at his best, and Trout having his best year ever, and Jered Weaver getting hitters out without his old stuff, and C.J. Cron up from the minor leagues to lend a bat, and so on.

The owner has left the club alone, and the club is responding with a fierce brand of baseball unlike any other club around the game today. No club in the major leagues is more aggressive on the bases or on the field or, for that matter, in the batter's box. 

Credit the players because they are playing, and credit the manager because he dictates how the game is going to be played, and credit the general manager because he assembles the playing roster.

But also credit the owner for allowing all of that to happen just by staying away. It's not an easy thing to do. If any of us owned the Angels, or any other club, we'd probably have our mitts all over it. Some of us might figure out when the bottom goes out that we don't know what we're doing, but you can look around sports and find plenty of owners who never get the picture. Moreno has.

A year ago, Moreno was the most reviled man in baseball across Los Angeles. This season, Moreno is the city's unsung baseball hero.

Richards, big arm, keys to Angels contention

The Angels have the big right arm other clubs have paid for dearly. After making a huge error in 2013 by making Garrett Richards wait while signing free agent Joe Blanton and watching him give up home runs, Richards is getting those starts in 2014, and he's making them count. 

Angels right-hander Garrett Richards is capitalizing on his first real opportunity in the Angels' pitching rotation this season (EricEnfermero/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license).

By BILL PETERSON

Big Leagues in Los Angeles

Of all the reasons for the Angels to enter today's games with the second-best record (67-44) in baseball – and there are many – none is so striking as the emergence of Garrett Richards as a big arm in that starting rotation. Time and again, we've seen Richards own his games this season, though none have been better than his five-hit shutout against the Dodgers at Dodger Stadium Monday night.

A year ago, the Angels seemed to have no confidence in Richards, their 2009 first-round draft pick from the University of Oklahoma They might have had their reasons, but those reasons weren't good enough. Rather than stick Richards in the rotation and let him try to swim, they thought it would be prudent to sign Joe Blanton for two years at a total of $15 million and give those starts to him. We saw how that turned out.

Blanton finished 2-14 with a 6.04 ERA in 2013, allowing two home runs for every nine innings pitched. No Angels starting pitcher has turned in a worse campaign since Jim Abbott's regrettable 1996 season, which ended 2-18 with a 7.18 ERA. While Blanton couldn't keep the ball in the park last year, Abbott just couldn't get the ball over the plate in 1996, walking 4.9 hitters per nine innings.

With Blanton taking those starts, the Angels decided to try Richards as a power arm from the bullpen. But relief pitching has never suited Richards. As a reliever, he has taken the ball 55 times in his career, throwing a 4.57 ERA, with hitters hammering out a .736 OPS and a .327 batting average on balls hit in play. In 63 innings as a reliever, he has a WHIP of 1.492. 

Whether he's better equipped psychologically to be a starting pitcher – we should leave that to a psychologist. But the results are clear. He has taken 52 career starts now, covering 320 1/3 innings with a 3.51 ERA and a 1.223 WHIP with a .281 batting average on balls hit in play.

A good portion of those numbers as a starter, of course, are from this season, when he has been a starting pitcher from the beginning. And it isn't just because he's a starter that he's performing so much better. His approach to hitters is improved because he obviously has more confidence in his stuff. That, and his stuff is better.

In years past, Richards would enter a game and everything would be hard, everything would be away. We should say everything was relatively hard, because even his slider averages 87.49 miles per hour and his change up averages 89.83, according to Brooks Baseball. Either of those is a pretty good Jered Weaver fastball these days. 

The key, though, is that he is spotting with greater variety against right-handed hitters and left-handed hitters, and he is throwing those off-speed pitches more often. By the reckoning at Brooks Baseball, Richards is throwing the off-speed pitches 35.82 percent of the time in 2014, compared with 31.53 percent of the time in 2013. Out of every 100 pitches he throws, which basically amounts to a start, Richards is throwing four or five more off-speed pitches than last year.

It's a big difference. His control is good, but it certainly isn't better (2.9 walks per nine innings this year against 2.7 last year), and he's striking out 9.0 batters every nine innings (compared with 63 in 2013). But when hitters make contact, it's not as solid. We can see that not just from watching, but also from noting that batting average on balls hit in play against him is down from .308 in 2013 to .258 this season.

Along with that, all of his pitches are harder, again, per Brooks Baseball, compared with 2013. His four-seam fastball is up from 95.38 mph to 97.19, his sinker is up from 95.43 to 96.84, his change up is up from 88.71 to 89.83, his slider is up from 86.24 to 87.49, and his curve is up from 78.18 to 79.56.

Don't know if there's a correlation here, but Richards leads the American League in two categories: wild pitches (21) and fewest home runs allowed per nine innings (0.294)

A much more obvious improvement to the naked eye is seen by simply watching how left-handed hitters now encounter Richards, which is not comfortably. He's not afraid to go in on left-handed hitters, and they're not dealing with it. Left-handed hitters are batting .190 with a .516 OPS against him. Last year, those numbers were .281 and .751.

Which is to say that Richards is putting it all together. Add it up, and he's 12-4 with a 2.58 ERA this season. Richards, at this moment, has the biggest big right arm – the hardest, at least – of any starting pitcher in the American League. Other clubs have paid deadly to add starting pitchers this season. The Angels gave a chance to a guy who they had lying around. After Monday night's game, Albert Pujols was, in the presence or reporters, putting the name of Garrett Richards in the same breath with the Cy Young Award.

One question frequently posed about Richards concerns his durability. He has consistently pitched 145-150 innings in his five full-season years as a professional, and never more than 157. With his five-hit, nine-strikeout performance in a 5-0 win against the Dodgers Monday night, Richards now has worked 153 1/3 innings in 2014.

With 51 games remaining in the regular season, Richards stands to take the ball 10 more times before the end of September. Then come the playoffs, when the Angels are certain to depend on him. He's 26 now, well into his professional career, and well past the age when we would expect the Angels to go easy on him.

Can Richards put up 10-15 more starts this season and load, maybe, another 100-plus innings onto his arm?

There's only one way to find out.

Editor's note: All numbers in this piece, except those specifically attributed to Brooks Baseball, are from Baseball-Reference.com.

Torrid Trout could succeed (finally) in MVP bid

No one has questioned Mike Trout's greatness in his first two years with the Angels, but that never got him an MVP award. This season, the way he's going right now, there might not be any stopping him. The Angels are winning, and Trout is a key reason.

Mike Trout robs J.J. Hardy of a home run in Baltimore in 2012 (Keith Allison/Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license).


By BILL PETERSON
Big Leagues in Los Angeles

Arguments have raged for the last couple of years as to whether Mike Trout was or was not the best baseball player in the world. The arguments against him boiled down to this: Miguel Cabrera's Detroit Tigers were one of the best teams in the world, while Trout's Angels were not.

Sensible enough. There's only one true value in sports. Winning. Thus, good players on winning teams are more valuable than good players on losing teams.

In 2014, though, the Angels are a winning club, 36-28, contending closely in the American League West and holding the league's top wild card position. Trout is a great player building another great season. Might be too early to say so, but this could be Trout's year.

Cabrera's batting numbers merited the American League triple crown in 2012 and those numbers were, on the whole, even better in 2013, though not good enough for the triple crown in the later case. In each case, though, the Tigers won their division.

Trout's batting numbers weren't as good in either case, but he brought so much more to the table as a defender and base runner that he truly was at least as good overall. Unfortunately, for Trout, the fortunes of his club took him out of the running for serious MVP consideration. Cabrera won it both times.

Famously, Trout still was farming in Salt Lake when the Angels went off to their terrible start in 2012, coming up a month into the season and still making enough of a mark to win Rookie of the Year. In large part because of Trout, the Angels rallied to the fringe of the AL wild card race and Trout entered the MVP conversation. Last season, the Angels started even worse and never recovered, dooming Trout's MVP candidacy.

The last month has seen a re-birth of the Angels as a contender and made Trout, once more, a front runner for the league's MVP award. Through games of June 10, Trout batted .294, and he’s rising quickly. His power numbers of 12 homers and 45 RBIs put him on schedule to surpass his previous highs of 30 and 97. He's the everyday center fielder, where he is a plus performer.

What's more, Trout is becoming a game breaker, not merely a great player. On May 15, hit a three-run homer in the bottom of the ninth against the Tampa Bay Rays, giving the Angels a 6-5 win. It was Trout's first walk-off RBI of any kind in the big leagues. On June 6, Trout hit a grand slam with the Angels down, 5-1, in the bottom of the eighth. It came against White Sox left-hander Chris Sale, who, up to that moment, had allowed only two runs in 31 innings against the Angels during his career. The Angels ended up beating the Chicago White Sox, 6-5.

And Trout is hot. Through June 10, Trout batted .386 (22-for-57) in his last 16 games, raising his average from .264 to .294. He hit in 17 of his last 18 games, reached base in 29 of his last 30 games and drove in 24 runs in his last 25 games.

All that production is coming with plate discipline. For the season, Trout has 68 strikeouts and 35 walks, so he stands to strike out 160 times, which would be a career high, and he's only walking about half as much. But he has 14 walks and 16 strikeouts in his last 20 games. He's finding it.

When we look in the numbers at why the Angels are 20-11 starting with May 9, it's clearly the pitching, especially the starters. The Angels' staff is putting up a 3.54 ERA during that run, compared with an ERA of 3.96 across the AL this season. The Angels this year are second in the AL in starter ERA (3.61) and their 27 wins by starting pitchers also is second. Opponents are batting .231 against the Angels, which is another second-best mark across the league.

Offensively, the Angels have been nothing special during their 20-11 surge. Their long slash during that period is .259/.328/.405/.733. The AL's long slash for the season is .253/.321/.395/.715.

Thus, the Angels are just a tinge better than the average AL offense during this hottest period of their last three seasons. And where would they be without Trout? During that period, Trout is .303/.393/.586/.979. Trout has scored or driven in 35 of the club's 134 runs during that period, accounting for 26 percent of the club's offense (16 runs and 25 RBI, minus six homers).

Unlike the last two seasons, the Angels are an interesting, exciting and successful club in 2014. They've rallied to within 2 1/2 games of the Oakland Athletics in the AL West.

This club has many success stories. Albert Pujols still isn't nearly the player he used to be, but he leads the club with 15 homers and he's running well. Erick Aybar is once more a dynamic player. Colin Cowgill is a pleasant surprise, as the Angels are 34-21 when he plays and 2-7 when he doesn't. Garrett Richards has become a force in the starting rotation, allowing only one earned run in his last two starts (15 innings) to feed his total output of 6-2 with a 3.09 ERA.

But Trout is in the middle of the whole operation. And the way he's going right now, he's going to finally win that MVP award, so long as the Angels keep winning with him.

Six straight wins: Angels 5, Kansas City 2

The Angels have won seven of their last 10 games, tacking up an OPS of .922 in that time. Friday, in a 5-2 win in Kansas City, the Angels claimed their sixth straight win with 11 hits. The Royals, in their last 10 games, have an OPS of .661 and lost eight of the 10.

Mike Trout has been a demon in the batter's box and on the base paths lately for the Angels (Keith Allison/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike Generic 2.0 license).

By BILL PETERSON
Big Leagues in Los Angeles


The game: May 24, Angels at Kansas City, American League. The Angels entered 20-27, tied for third place AL West, 10 games behind Texas. Kansas City entered 21-23, third place AL Central, five games behind Cleveland.

The pitchers: Angels, Jason Vargas, left hander (3-3 3.55). Kansas City, Luis Mendoza, right hander (1-2, 5.50).

The result: Angels 5, Kansas City 2 (Baseball-reference.com box score).

Summary: For the Angels right now, the hitting is good, the pitching is good and the fielding, at times, is real good. They're rocking, and Kansas City is reeling.

The pitching: Like just about anyone else facing the Royals these days, Angels left hander Jason Vargas had them eating out of his hand. Vargas was almost all fastball and changeup, mixing in, maybe, a curve or slider by the innings. He tended to the simpler plan lower in the Kansas City lineup, and tended to be most tricky against designated hitter Billy Butler, who really got the Angels' attention with that five-for-five game on May 13. Vargas gave up two runs in 7 1/3 innings, allowing five hits and walking four ... In seven of his last eight starts, Vargas has pitched seven or more innings and allowed three or fewer runs ... Garrett Richards, relieving Vargas, threw real well, allowing only one hit in 1 2/3 innings. Fangraphs.com says Richards has the fastest average fastball in the game at 95 MPH. In this outing, he topped out at 97 ... Richards picked up his first save of the year ... Richards took the save situation instead of Ernesto Frieri, who, despite two saves and a hold in his last three appearances, gave up at least a run in each appearance for totals of four earned runs in 3 1/3 innings ...

Kansas City manager Ned Yost told reporters he was plenty happy with the work of his starter, Luis Mendoza, who allowed only one run in five innings. However, Yost said, Mendoza was down to an effective two-seam fastball by the time he finished the fifth inning, so he went to the bullpen and Luke Hochevar, who has been effective there. However, Hochevar had an unfortunate night and took his first blown save of the year ...

The hitting: The Angels totaled 11 hits in this one, with at least a hit for everyone, except for Howie Kendrick, who still drove in a run with a sacrifice fly. Well, somebody has to make the outs, and Kendrick is batting .293 ... On May 13, the Royals visited Anaheim, designated hitter Billy Butler went five-for-five with five RBI, and the visitors claimed an 11-4 win. Since that night, the Angels are hitting, and the Royals aren't. In their ten games since then, the Angels are batting .303 with 16 homers and a slash line of .384/.538/.922. In so doing, they have raised their batting for the season 10 points to .262, their on-base percentage 15 points to .325, their slugging percentage 27 points to .427 and their OPS 42 points to .752. They also walked 46 times in those games, which is 4.6 times per game and well up from their average of 2.8 walks before then ... Since that same May 13 game, the Royals are batting .252 in 10 games with three homers and a slash line of .318/.343/.661. They have brought down their team batting average three points to .264, their on-base percentage is the same at .317, their slugging percentage is down 11 points to .384 and their OPS is down 11 points to .701 ...

The base running: Running all over the place in this game. Mike Trout matched his forcefulness at the plate with daring on the bases. He came home from third on a wild pitch in the third inning, ran like mad from first to third on a short single to center in the fifth, and, in the seventh, he led off and stole second base (thanks to a gift call by second base umpire Marty Foster) ... Right after Chris Iannetta homered against Kansas City's Luke Hochevar in the sixth inning, J.B. Shuck ran hard on his triple to right field. The Angels apparently tried to get Shuck home with a squeeze play, but Erick Aybar apparently missed out on that appearance and didn't get the bunt down, so Shuck was dead between third and home ... Shuck was thrown out trying to steal in the eighth inning after leading off with a walk ... Lorenzo Cain set up a scoring fifth inning for the Royals just by running hard. He led off with a ground ball to Angels shortstop Erick Aybar, who fielded the ball in short left field and didn't get the throw to first in time. Cain, then stole second base without a throw on a 1-0 pitch and scored on a soft single by Chris Getz past a diving Aybar ...

The fielding: As the just noted fifth-inning escapades of Lorenzo Cain illustrate, it was an inning of near misses in the field for Angels shortstop Erick Aybar ... In Thursday night's series opener, a 5-4 win for the Angels, the Angels made a number of beautiful defensive plays. Third baseman Alberto Callaspo turned a double down the line into a ground out with a sharp play going his right, Howie Kendrick played outstanding second base on three different pivots to make them all into double plays, and J.B. Shuck made a nice running catch to his right in left field ... The Angels weren't as sharp defensively in the Friday game. In addition to his misfortunes in the fifth inning, Aybar made a high throw to Kendrick trying to feed a double play, and Kendrick didn't catch it. Error on Kendrick ... Kansas City, on the other hand, made two notable defensive plays Friday, including a leaping throw going toward the hole by shortstop Alcides Escobar for one ground out and a spinning throw by second baseman Chris Getz going to his left and then throwing across his body for another ...

Strategic moves: It's not part of any manager's strategy to deal with bad calls by the umpires. In the seventh inning Friday, Mike Trout led off for the Angels with a walk, then stole second base. But the throw by Kansas City catcher Salvador Perez and the tag by second baseman Chris Getz were clearly in time. Second base umpire Marty Foster flat missed the call. There should have been one out and no one on in a 2-2 game. Instead, there was a runner on second and no one out. It changes the whole approach pitching down the order. Suddenly, the batter, Albert Pujols, is a threat to drive in the tying run. So, Kansas City reliever Aaron Crow missed with his last two fastballs to walk Pujols on five pitches. No outs. Big inning brewing. If it's a 3-1 count to Pujols with one out and no one on, there's a different plan on that next pitch. But Pujols is hot, so Crow threw a high fastball well out of the zone, hoping Pujols would chase and knowing that a walk isn't the worst outcome. Again, though, Pujols is hot, so he laid off and the Angels had two on with no one out. The Angels followed all that with a single by Mark Trumbo, a sacrifice fly by Howie Kendrick and a double by Alberto Callaspo ... Nice move by Angels manager Mike Scioscia, bringing in Garrett Richards in a save situation. The regular closer, Ernesto Frieri, has struggled of late and Scioscia is demonstrating that he will not hold his team hostage over a struggling reliever. So many managers will keep going to the closer and say, "He's the guy we need to have in there at the end," because they don't want to take responsibility for the ninth inning. Scioscia takes that responsibility ...

What now: With this one game, the Angels moved up in the standings and the Royals moved down. The Angels now are 21-27, third place in the AL West, moving ahead of Seattle, which lost to Texas. The Angels still are 10 games behind the Rangers. Kansas City fell to 21-24, falling behind Chicago into fourth in the AL West. The series in Kansas City continues Saturday (11:10 a.m. PDT). The Angels are going with Billy Buckner, who has yet to appear in the big leagues this year. He will become the 21st pitcher the Angels have used this season. The club record is 29, set in 1996. Pitching for Kansas City is right hander Jeremy Guthrie (5-2, 3.49).

Angels need better results in draft

The Angels have not been incredibly successful during the 21st century when it comes to scouting, drafting, signing and developing players. The media's player development experts place the Angels among the bottom half of all big league organizations when it comes to creating player value. The current scouting director, Ric Wilson, conducted his second draft for the club this week.

By BILL PETERSON
Big Leagues in Los Angeles

The Angels needed a big start from a rookie Tuesday night, and Garrett Richards delivered with eight strikeouts in seven innings, helping the club to an easy 6-1 win against the Seattle Mariners at the Big A. Coming on the heels of another disappointing start by Ervin Santana, Richards illustrated, after a fashion as fresh as the headlines, the importance of the June amateur draft.

It also called attention to how little the Angels have accomplished in the draft during this century. Just for getting his first big league win Tuesday, Richards already is the third most accomplished starting pitcher the Angels have drafted and developed in this century, according to the baseball-reference.com version of WAR. He's sitting on 0.1. Without going back and counting through all the picks, it's safe to say the Angels have drafted about 25 pitchers per year this century, coming to 300 pitchers in 12 drafts entering this year. Richards has won one major league start, and he is the third best starting pitcher they produced from those drafts. As of now.

Extrapolating from the numbers explicitly on baseball-reference.com, the Angels have generated a mere 98.9 net WAR worth of big leaguers who they have drafted, signed and developed, starting with 2000. More than one-fourth of the value they have created is Jered Weaver with his 25.6 lifetime WAR. Nobody who sees the free agent contracts on the Angels would accuse them of being a homegrown operation. Seeing how little the Angels have produced, it's understandable that they would seek free agent talent.

Beginning with the draft in 2000, the Angels have scouted, drafted, signed and developed a grand total of 24 players who have come to the major leagues and made positive contributions, as measured by WAR. That is, in 12 drafts through 2011, the Angels haven't produced a 25-man roster of productive major leaguers.

In fact, during the same years, the Angels have scouted, drafted, signed and developed 22 players who have zero or negative career WAR. That is, they do replacement quality work, if that. Thus, in 12 drafts, the Angels picked and signed 46 players who made it to the major leagues, at whatever level of achievement, out of about 600 draft selections.

Don't know how any of that ranks across baseball. However, the Angels generally are regarded as a bottom-half organization in terms of the talent across their system. Baseball America ranks the Angels 19th (of 30 clubs), Baseball Prospectus ranks them 23rd, Fan Graphs ranks them 19th, John Sickels at minorleagueball.com ranks them 18th and ESPN's Keith Law ranks them 15th.

As to what the draft has produced this century, this is your All-Star team of players the Angels have drafted and signed starting in 2000: Jeff Mathis catching, Casey Kotchman at first base, Howie Kendrick at second base, Sean Rodriguez at shortstop, Dallas McPherson at third base, Mike Trout in left field, Peter Bourjos in center field, Kole Calhoun in right field, and Mike Napoli at designated hitter. The bench would be Bobby Wilson, Freddy Sandoval, Hank Conger and Tommy Murphy. Jered Weaver, Joe Saunders and Garrett Richards are your top three starting pitchers: Pick two more starters out of this group (the rest go to the bullpen): Bobby Cassevah, Jordan Walden, Michael Kohn (disabled), David Herndon, Steven Shell, Jake Woods and Matt Hensley. The closer is Bobby Jenks. Those are all the players with positive WAR.

Being fair, a couple players with zero or negative WAR are youngsters, like Andrew Romine, Trevor Bell and Will Smith. Others, like David Carpenter and Tyler Chatwood, are young big leaguers having those struggles. But Chatwood, the club's top pick in 2008, now is gone to Colorado by trade. And Bell, the top Angels pick in 2005, is well past due to be contributing in the major leagues. As fiascoes rank, though, Bell isn't quite with Brandon Wood, the Angels' 2003 top pick whose WAR is minus-four.

We're dealing here only with the draft, which isn't the only way to procure amateur talent. Latin American operations are huge. Among the Latin American players the Angels have brought through, we find Santana and Erick Aybar. Infrequently, an amateur free agent, undrafted by the majors, finds his way to The Show.

Starting with 2000, the Angels have had three scouting directors, meaning three different scouting regimes. The scouting director now is Ric Wilson, who just conducted his second draft this week. It's impossible, therefore, to assess his performance, though he clearly marks a change of direction from his predecessor, Eddie Bane (2004-2010).

Wilson picked only six high school players in 2011, none in the first ten rounds. This year, with limited picks due to the free agent signings of Albert Pujols and C.J. Wilson, the scouting director took only five high school players. For his final draft in 2010, Bain took six high school players in the first seven selections. Only once did Bain take a four-year college player in any of his first three picks. Curiously, it was Bain's first pick, and the best he ever made, tabbing Weaver from Long Beach State with the first selection in 2004. From that point forward, Bain's drafting record has its ups and downs.

Preceding Bain, the Angels' scouting director was Donny Rowland, whose record isn't Hall of Fame material. That said, Bain probably isn't going to catch him. Among the players on the All-Star team mentioned above, Rowland drafted Napoli, Jenks, Kotchman, Mathis, McPherson, Kendrick and Saunders. He also drafted Wood. 

The Angels have won some with these players and turned them into other good players. They got 4.7 of Kotchman's lifetime 7.0 WAR before they traded him to Atlanta in 2008 for Mark Teixeira, who contributed 3.6 WAR to the Angels' stretch effort that year. When Teixeira left as a free agent, the Angels received two compensatory first round picks in 2009. Bain turned the first one into pitcher Tyler Skaggs, who later went to Arizona in the deal for Dan Haren. Bain turned the second pick into Mike Trout. So, the selection of Kotchman, the Angels' first-round pick in 2001, keeps paying back to the organization. Between Kotchman, Teixeira and Trout, that pick has produced 11 WAR for the Angels, and there's more to come.

The Angels have a similar success story to tell with their first pick in 2002, Joe Saunders. The Angels expended 6.1 of Saunders' 7.7 lifetime WAR before trading him and three other players to Arizona for Dan Haren in 2010. Since then, Saunders has produced 1.6 WAR for the Diamondbacks and Haren has generated 7.2 WAR for the Angels. So, that first-round pick also keeps producing.

Those were Rowland's success stories, the 2001 and 2002 drafts. The Angels' first five picks in 2001 (Kotchman, Mathis, McPherson, Shell and Woods) all reached the Angels and contributed positive WAR, but they only add up to 10.4. The 2002 draft also produced Kendrick, who has a 14.8 WAR. Rowland’s first draft, in 2000, and his last, in 2003, weren't so happy.

In 2000, Rowland selected Aaron Hill and David Murphy out of high school, but both decided on college and went to other clubs in later years. They have a combined WAR of 24.0. Hill, at 17.5 WAR, is the most valuable player the Angels drafted and didn't sign in this century. Murphy, at 6.5, is tied with Buster Posey for second. Bain took a crack at Posey out of high school with a 50th round pick in 2005.

The Angels also selected Jenks out of high school in the fifth round in 2000. But the Angels couldn't make it work with Jenks and they waived him to the Chicago White Sox after the 2004 season. Jenks powered the White Sox bullpen to the 2005 world championship. Jenks now has a career 7.9 WAR and 173 saves.

Then, there's Mike Napoli, taken in the 17th round with the 500th pick in 2000. Napoli made it up to the Angels, of course, and gave them 10.1 WAR before they dealt him to Toronto in the infamous Vernon Wells deal at the end of 2010. Since the trade, Napoli has added 6.2 WAR, while Wells has subtracted 1.2 from his lifetime WAR, which is down to 24.8.

The 2003 draft is painful to recount, as well. Begin with Wood, the top pick. He was Baseball America's No. 3 prospect for 2006. But he never cut down his strikeouts. Now, he's playing for Colorado Springs in the Colorado organization, turning the light mile-high air into three homers and a .337 slugging percentage in 163 at-bats.

In the 2003 third round, Rowland took a good high school shortstop, Sean Rodriguez out of Miami. On Sept. 1, 2009, the Angels, driving for a division title, dealt Rodriguez and two other players to Tampa Bay for a 25-year-old left hander who already had 55 big league wins, Scott Kazmir. Since the trade, Rodriguez has a 7.9 WAR, while Kazmir's career war has declined by 1.7 to 6.7.

Bain took the reins in 2004 and began with a bang. First pick in 2004, Weaver. By WAR, Weaver is the best Angels' draft pick of the last 15 years, since they tabbed Troy Glaus with the No. 3 overall selection in 1997. Glaus finished his career with a 35.0 WAR.

Bain dialed up another win in the 18th round in 2004, selecting Trumbo out of Villa Park High School. The Angels selected Trumbo as a pitcher. He has a 4.0 lifetime WAR as a hitter, and he keeps adding to it.

In 2005, Bain selected Bourjos, a high school outfielder from Scottsdale, AZ, in the tenth round. Bourjos has a 6.4 lifetime WAR. There are no other success stories from that draft. Walden, selected in the 12th round in 2006, has a 1.4 WAR and is the biggest success from that draft. Bain's 2007 draft is shaping up as a complete bust, and we would say the same about 2008 if the Angels hadn't dealt their top pick that year, Chatwood, to Colorado last winter for Chris Iannetta.

But Bain's 2009 draft is looking much better. It starts with Trout. Then, there's Richards, taken with a first-round sandwich pick that year out of the University of Oklahoma. The Angels sent two left handers taken in that draft -- sandwich pick Tyler Skaggs and second rounder Patrick Corbin -- to Arizona in the Haren deal. From the 2010 draft, Calhoun already has arrived. Another selection from that year, third round pitcher Donn Roach, went to San Diego recently for reliever Ernesto Frieri. While Frieri has stabilized the Angels bullpen, Roach is running a 9-1 record with a 1.98 ERA in 11 starts in the California League.

With Trout, Richards and Calhoun already called up to the big leagues this year, the Angels have about tapped what their organization can produce for them this year. The next best draft prospect, for all we know, is toiling at Inland Empire, where last year’s top Angels pick, C.J. Cron, is tied for fourth in the California League with 42 RBI.

(Editor's note: The above has been revised and corrected to show that the Angels used one of their supplementary picks for losing Teixeira to draft Tyler Skaggs, rather than Randal Grichuk.)

The Rangers are coming ... but so are the Angels

When last the Angels faced the Texas Rangers, they lost two of three while the Rangers scored 25 runs. The Angels left Arlington eight games down in the AL West. Now, the Rangers are in Anaheim this weekend. The Angels, 11-6 since they left Arlington, are presented a serious opportunity to put themselves into the divisional race.

By BILL PETERSON
Big Leagues in Los Angeles

Man, we were really weepin' and wailin' back in middle May, when the Angels left Arlington, TX, at the end of a very frustrating encounter with the defending American League champions.

The Angels lost two of three to the Texas Rangers, who were so locked in at the moment that they seemed unstoppable. Their 13-6 win to close out the Angels series was their fourth trip to double-digit scoring in seven games. Scheduled early against some of their more serious rivals, the Rangers beat most of them to a pulp. A very for real ball club.

That final loss in Arlington intensified the sense that maybe the Angels are up against a little too much this year. Though the Rangers won it by a touchdown and the extra point, the game had a “just missed" feeling about if for the Angels. They had their ace, Jered Weaver, pitching for a chance to win the series, and Weaver continuously worked ahead of the Texas hitters. But the Rangers were so focused that they consistently turned 0-2 into long at-bats ending with singles and doubles. Weaver left the mound in the fourth inning talking to himself.

The loss left the Angels at 15-20. Maybe it was going to be that kind of year. And, maybe, the Rangers are just too good, anyway.

Since then, the Angels are 11-6. The Rangers are 8-8. And the Rangers are in Anaheim this weekend, starting with a game Friday night at Angel Stadium. The Angels are doing much better now. They might even be favored to pass this weekend’s audition for Pennant Race Theater.

Since the Angels left Arlington, they have picked up 2 1/2 games and now they are down 5 1/2 games to the Rangers in the American League West, where they now are the second-place team instead of the last-place team. The Angels have picked up ground within the division, going 7-2 against Oakland and Seattle since they left Arlington. During that same period, the Rangers are 3-5 against Oakland and Seattle.

Returning home on May 14, the Angels split two games with Oakland. The A's then moved straight on to Texas and split two games with the Rangers in Arlington. The Rangers went to Seattle May 21-23 and lost two of three to the Mariners. The Angels immediately followed the Rangers into Seattle and swept four games.

That's sort of the head-to-head picture, within the division, at this moment. Which club is better, right now? You decide. Or, we can just see what happens when they play.

Friday night, the Angels send Jerome Williams (5-2, 3.81) against Colby Lewis (4-3, 3.58) for the Rangers. The Texas hitters are 12 for 19 with four homers and eight RBI against Williams. The bulk of that came on May 12, when Williams came in for C.J. Wilson after a rain delay in Arlington. See what Williams does when he pitches against the Rangers on his own night. Mark Trumbo is four for ten and Peter Bourjos is five for 16 against Lewis, but the Angels hitters are otherwise undistinguished against the Texas right hander.

The middle game on Saturday will feature a rematch of Wilson (6-4, 2.77) and Texas right hander Yu Darvish (7-2, 3.25), for whom Wilson was essentially shown the door by the Rangers at the end of last season. They were the pairing on that night of the rain delay. Let's just say that Darvish received more accolades for coming back out after the rain than Wilson received for starting the next day. Saturday, they might actually pitch a full game against each other.

Sunday, the series closes with a mystery pitcher for the Angels. It's Weaver's turn, but the ace is out with back trouble. The Angels haven't announced rookie right hander Garrett Richards (0-0, 0.00) as the starter, but he seems the likely pick. Richards, 24, was the Angels' No. 1 pick in 2009 out of the University of Oklahoma. He has come quickly, covering all levels of minor league baseball with a 32-10 record and a 3.31 ERA in less than three years. The Rangers will counter with lefty Matt Harrison (6-3, 4.41).

Ending that series in Arlington early last month, we saw nothing to make us believe the Angels could become a going concern in the American League West. They were eight games behind already and trending downward, while the Rangers trended upward. Seeing no hitting, we saw no resilience. After all, you can’t be resilient if you can’t hit back.

But now the Angels are able to hit back, and that has enabled them to bounce back. And if they can summon a sweep of the Rangers this weekend, they will have bounced back to within 2 ½ games of the AL West lead.